Capote Trailer

Capote

Capote is the biographical film about writer Truman Capote and his assignment for The New Yorker to write the non-fiction book In Cold Blood. Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of Capote.

Kirk Honeycutt

Capote represents something unique in cinema.…Most eye-catching for critics and audiences in the weeks to come will be Philip Seymour Hoffman's brilliant metamorphosis into the persona of the late author.

Ellen Marshall

One of the most beautifully stark, yet provocative and powerful films of 2005 has to be Capote. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who gives his finest screen performance to date, literally becomes Truman Capote through effete mannerism, nasaly voice & self-absorbed tone.

Kim Newman

An outstanding film, showcasing a great performance, at once celebrating, analysing and criticising an important writer and his major book. You'll appreciate it more if you've read "In Cold Blood" recently and have seen enough footage of the real Truman Capote to know Hoffman is underplaying.

Michael Sragow

Peter Rainer

On the personal betrayals that accompany Capote's ache for literary transcendence. The betrayals were necessary to create "In Cold Blood." This is why Capote is such an unsettlingly ambiguous experience.

Robert Wilonsky

David Rooney

The mesmerizing performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the celebrated writer dominates every scene, while director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman's penetrating study enthralls in every aspect.

Stephen Hunter

David Denby

Small-scaled and limited, Capote is nevertheless the most intelligent, detailed, and absorbing film ever made about a writer's working method and character--in this case, a mixed quiver of strength, guile, malice, and mendacity.

David Edelstein

Richard Corliss

Hoffman and the film are terrific. Supported by the eminent Catherine Keener (as author Harper Lee) and Chris Cooper (as detective Alvin Dewey), Hoffman begins with a dead-on impersonation of Capote that soon becomes a kind of channeling as the audience comes to see this American tragedy through his eyes.

Peter Travers

Rene Rodriguez

The movie implies that despite its thunderous success, the book also destroyed Capote, who crossed a line in his quest for personal glory for which he could never forgive himself -- no matter how many accolades it brought him.

Carrie Rickey

Miller and Futterman tell their story with plain, uninflected film language, permitting the ambiguities to surface. Theirs is not the anti-capital-punishment tract of Richard Brooks' excellent 1967 film "In Cold Blood." It is a story about an accomplice to crime who lived to tell the story.

Glenn Kenny

Catherine Keener is remarkably subtle and soulful as Capote's friend and helpmeet Harper Lee, who delivers a shocking verdict against him at the end, but the movie, as you probably will not be surprised to learn, is owned by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Rick Groen

Beyond the eerily evocative impersonation, Hoffman's brilliance lies in not only playing the shrewd puppet master but also revealing that he too comes with strings attached, the most dominant being his consuming need for acclaim.

Nathan Rabin

Capote begins as a sprawling, vivacious comedy-drama in which Hoffman's Capote is only one of a number of fascinating characters, including Chris Cooper's upstanding, ramrod-straight lawman and Keener's tough, blunt assistant/sidekick/foil/author.

Kimberley Jones

The fault does not lie with Hoffman (who doesn't so much act out Capote's distinctive mannerisms and high-pitched lisp as channel them); his performance is undeniably great. Everything else – solid, satisfying though it may be – falls short of that greatness.

Jack Mathews

What "Capote" fails to reveal to the audience is the sense of a homoerotic attraction between the author and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.). It is more than implied that one exists, but there isn't a scene between them that supports it or even makes it believable.

J. Hoberman

Stanley Kauffmann

A slight conceptual nudge and Capote would have focused on (as the closing line tells us) its true subject: an American author's success story. That theme is there, all right, but because it is not centered it is repellent, as the film pretends to be an account of the author's descent into collateral agony...With the true theme of fame-hunger fully fashioned, the film would have been a more authentic American epic.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

The depictions of novelist Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) and editor William Shawn (Bob Balaban) aren't convincing, but Miller is mainly interested in Capote's identification and duplicitous relationship with Perry Smith, one of the murderers he was writing about, and that story rings true.

Stephanie Zacharek

While the filmmaking overall suffers from a kind of tasteful, low-key blandness, Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Capote keeps the blood coursing through it. He's the bright, chilling spot of color at the center of an otherwise beige movie.

Ken Tucker

Aside from yet another solid performance from Catherine Keener-playing a Harper Lee just preparing to publish "To Kill a Mockingbird," and here to act as Capote's unheeded moral conscience-that's the ONLY reason to see Capote.